The entrepreneur and technology theorist weighs in on drones, surveillance, and what's coming next.

All the components in a smartphone — the sensors, the GPS, the camera, the ARM core processors, the wireless, the memory, the battery — all that stuff, which is being driven by the incredible economies of scale and innovation machines at Apple, Google, and others, is available for a few dollars. They were essentially “unobtainium” 10 years ago. This is stuff that used to be military industrial technology; you can buy it at RadioShack now.

My first real smartphone was a Treo 600. It launched in late 2003 and didn’t make it to the UK until early 2004; I was a bleeding-edge early adopter of smartphones. You’ll note my article dates to May 2003, before I got the memo.